An introduction to difference

My students are always shocked, sometimes quite visibly, to learn that objects such as desks, a chalk/white board, the presence of other people their age staring at someone different than them--someone with their shirt tucked in--all contribute to one loud lecture. Without having to vocalize it, even think it, everyone in such a room knows this is a classroom, and this is how I am to exist in a classroom. Exposing the identity shaping culture of a classroom is relatively easy. I do the same thing a professor in community college did to me. I wait for the first student to raise their hand, then stare at them, making sure to look completely confused. This has, so far, always lead to a conversation about how we all know what such a strange action means. And more importantly, what the action means in a classroom as opposed to a restaurant or at Grandma's Thanksgiving table. It's always different and it's always the place that dictates that difference. Invariably, a few students will begin to admit they have an identity in the presence of desks and chalk boards that doesn't necessarily survive apart from rooms which contains these artifacts. (It's a discovery that convinces me that the real academic conversations, the ones teachers like me long for in the classroom, will only occur in the 'dorms." And that's okay, it has to be). My three classes at Miami University (a SEC, 40,000 student, traditional college) all have a whiteboard, desks, a desktop computer connected to a projector, and this cool "overhead machine" that can put anything and everything up on the screen (including my face...in color. It rocks). So it looks like a classroom. I move the desks all over the room, I teach from different spots everyday--often I sit in one of the desks, and because the class is part of the University's Digital Writing Collaborative, every student has their laptop in front of them--we've never used a pencil. But it's still a classroom.

My three classes at Indiana University East (a 2,400 student commuter campus) look far more classroomy than my Miami classrooms. Yet the students often seem more willing to challenge what should take place in such in a space. No doubt this is because many of these students are what academe dubs "Non-traditional." They don't live on campus, many of them are over nineteen, they're married, working, trying to remember how they're expected to perform within the four walls of a classroom. I have plenty of students who are eighteen or nineteen, who just graduated from high school (in fact, the number of these students is quickly increasing at Indiana University East). But they sit next to forty-year-old single parents excited to finally be inside the college classroom, military men and women, and people (re)training for a new or different career. This changes things--to say the least.

As it stands, I'm not sure which classroom I prefer to be "in-front" of. I suppose choosing would be impossible when I see them both every week. My students and what happens in the classrooms we create together have, quite honestly, become my single obsession. The universities I work for are as widely different as each student's essay I grade. There are hundreds of blogs all over the web that deal with the Rhetoric and Composition classroom; they're personal, interesting, and I learn heaps from them. This blog, however, is a place for me to express my blunders, to help me define what 'success' means in the writing classroom, to connect a huge part of my life to those I miss and love, to support any instructor/teacher who wanders by, and most importantly, to learn what I know by using what will never be mine: language. It's time to do what I push my students to do.

Cheers!